Industry Will Incorporate 15 Million AI-enabled Devices by 2024 [Report]

The total number of AI-enabled devices in industrial manufacturing will reach 15.4 million by 2024, according to a new report by ABI Research, a global market advisory firm.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is sweeping the industrial manufacturing sector, its adoption and integration across manufacturing facilities spreading incredibly quickly. AI is revolutionizing a host of different processes, including generative design in product development, production forecasting in inventory management, and production processes like machine vision, defect inspection, production optimization, and predictive maintenance.

“AI in industrial manufacturing is a story of edge implementation,” says Lian Jye Su, Principal Analyst at ABI Research. “Since manufacturers are not comfortable having their data transferred to a public cloud, nearly all industrial AI training and inference workloads happen at the edge, namely on devices, gateways, and on-premise servers.”

Within industry, AI’s most popular use cases are predictive maintenance and equipment monitoring. In these two applications alone, AI installations are expected to reach 9.8 million and 6.7 million, respectively, by 2024.

For now, the major hurdle this sector has to overcome is the actual development and training of in-house AI installation and implementation teams, since most AI professionals tend to pursue jobs at digital internet startups and large-scale commercial brands.